Community Leader Toolkit
Here is everything you need to know to create, grow and sustain a thriving network:
Start by navigating to the Communities tab from your dashboard. Then, click the + button in the top right corner to begin creating a new community. Add a name for your community, a headline (short blurb or tagline for your community) and set a privacy setting. Public means anyone in the network can see your community and join it. Private means anyone in the network can see your community, but members must be approved by an admin or community leader to join. Invite Only means your community is invisible and will only be seen by members you invite to join. Finally, add a longer description to give members more information on your community and click Save Changes to create the community. After you click Save Changes, your community will show up in the list of communities. Add a header image that will display on the Communities page, in the community itself and in your community invitations. Now, you can invite members to join your community, start a discussion, post events and upload files.
Rights and Role as a Community Leader
The Community Leader’s role is to promote discussion, grow community membership, and monitor discussion content. Specifically, the role includes:
- Building presence in the community by inviting members to join, promoting others to Community Leader when applicable, and suspending members
- Maintaining activity within the community by posting content regularly and generating discussion topics to keep members engaged and the community valuable
- Moderating comment threads and discussions and upholding community guidelines to ensure topics are focused on the group’s purpose and goals
- Keep the Community Events and Files up-to-date with new activity
Inviting Members
As a Community Leader, it is your responsibility to grow the membership of your community. You can search for members in the network, filter by location or industry and send them a message to get them to join your community. Another way to invite members is to use our Community Invitation tool. You can invite members of the network or non-members to join your community directly through the community itself. If they are already a member of your network, they can click the button in the invitation generated from the community and will find the invitation waiting for them on their dashboard. If they are not a member of your network yet, they will be promoted to walk through on-boarding and create an account first, and then they will see the invitation waiting for them on their dashboard.
Discussions
To start a new discussion, navigate to the discussions tab within your community and click the + button at the top right. This will begin a new discussion thread where you can share links, videos, gifs and more in our rich text editor. Here are some content and engagement ideas for discussions to help drive activity in your community.
Events
Communities are a great way to cross-post and notified members about events. In Communities, you can easily create a new event, copy in a registration link or landing page, include images, flyers and more to the description, and post to the community. This will trigger a notification to all members of that Community when the new event is posted and 24-48 hours before the event occurs. You can use this to post in-person events, digital events like webinars, or to share deadlines for things like scholarships or job opportunities.
By joining a community, a member auto 'opts in' to receive email notifications about new topics created and events happening that are relevant to that community. These email notifications are critical for sharing timely information and making sure that members know when there are new conversations happening that they might want to be a part of. The two primary notifications we send out related to communities are the Discussions digest and the Events digest.